I’m building a nicely detailed Wright Trax bay window caboose. It has a beutifully detailed interior. The pictures I’ve been able to find are mostly gutted or refurbished for personal use. From what I’ve been able to determine the interior walls were a hospital green or industrial gray. Any help on the following would appreciated:
*lockers: color
*benches: fabric
*conductors desk: surface
Thanks.
Turd-let, Sink, etc, would have been metal. Ceramic type toilets aren’t really an option… Make a hard hitch and there goes the john!
Lockers would have been either wood or metal and any variation in between. Painted with whatever paint the railroad had on hand. Cabeese weren’t really “luxurious”.
Benches would have either been bare wood, or a canvas / vinyl type fabric. Whatever was cheap.
Desk surfaces were typically wood, or in later times a laminate style finish. The van at work that gets used for long shove moves has a metal top.
Usually the benches would have some sort of padding/mattress on them, since the crews used them to sleep on. (Generally the conductor and brakeman ate and slept in the caboose, while the engineer and fireman went to a hotel, rooming house, YMCA etc.) A light green (like Tamiya cockpit green or gray-green) would be a common color on the interior of most anything railroad related - cabooses, passenger cars, depots, roundhouses, etc. It depends a little on your era too, a wood caboose of the 1920’s wouldn’t be as well furnished as a 1960’s steel car.
Keep in mind too that cabooses up into the sixties were generally assigned to one conductor, who lived out of the caboose when on the road for years at a time. They often spent their own money to add homey details like curtains, new paint, better bedding etc.
If you can find a copy of “THE RAILROAD CABOOSE: Its 100-Year History, Legend and Lore” by William F. Knapke and Freeman Hubbard, pick it up. At the time the book came out in the 1960’s Knapke was in his nineties and was a former railroader with a wealth of personal first-hand knowledge of cabooses and RR history.
Here’s some interior pictures of a Reading Northeastern caboose…light tan/cream upper walls, and brown lower ones:
Here’s some of a Pennsy N5c, industrial gray everything, with black vinyl pads :
Nick
It varies by the era of the caboose. A person refurbished and restored a RDG caboose from the 1930’s and found up to 10 layers of paint in about 6 different colors (cream and wine, blue (3 shades), light green, grey)
Most modern cabooses are in a light grey or a green, but tan was also used. The seats would be covered in a blak, grey, brown or green oilcloth/vinyl. The desk surfaces would be grey or brown. the sink would be stainless. All colors subject to change when the caboose is rebuilt/painted.
If its a Rock Island Caboose the interior would be charred black, most of the ones I was on had been set or caught on fire and were gutted. 
Here are a bunch of links that might provide a little information.
Rich